Adult Education Quarterly

This article provides a feminist poststructural analysis of the authors' academic labor during a State of the Field Literature Review of Gender and Adult Learning for a government-funded educational body. Drawing on Foucault and feminist theorists, the authors pay particular attention to how power seeps down through the system to our bodies in our reading, writing, and analyzing tasks. Using a critically reflexive framework, the authors first examine how government's establishment of knowledge centers and committees, as well as calls for proposals, and work as technologies of power to produce effects such as resistances. Then, attention is turned to their position as feminist researchers who have an ambivalent relationship to some of the field's record on gender and learning. In so doing, the authors interrupt the binary of good researchers/bad government and identify themselves as simultaneously complicit and resistant.

A rationalist is prevailed upon to enroll in a program on meditation. During a day of silence, he begins to wonder about the concept of the self as implied in some forms of educational practice. Over the next few weeks, he identifies four doubts, which he calls a Marxian doubt, a dialectical doubt, an absurd doubt, and a moral doubt. He argues that each of these doubts has implications for the major forms of self-development programs commonly found in adult education curricula. If he is right, then a lot of education designed to promote transformative and experiential learning is flawed.

From the time adult education emerged as a field of study, it has suffered a crisis of identity by which the field is increasingly defined by a lack of consensus regarding its larger aspirations and operational boundaries. The purpose of this article is to begin deconstructing and reconstructing the field of adult education phenomenologically by (a) exploring the basic historical assumptions and socially constructed, collectivist realities on which adult education founded its theory and practice in the modern era, (b) elucidating the postmodern turn these realities have taken in the past half century, and (c) reconciling adult education's historical mission with new realities facing the field. This article ultimately concludes that any viable conception of adult education must not only make postmodern individuals better competitors in the global marketplace, but must also help them and the organizations they comprise to define themselves within a larger autopoietic web of relations.

Employing critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper examines the attempt to bridge a Canadian adult second language policy with an employment skills policy. The result is a third policy intended to improve language education and employment skills training for immigrants. The analysis reveals that the knowledge economy and human capital theory are the predominant discourses embedded in the policy documents. The paper argues that predominant discourses perpetuate power imbalances and essentialize worker and migrant subjectivities. Engaging in postcolonial theories of second language learning, the paper proposes another way of conceiving adult second language learning and its potential for policy development.